“I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is one of the most pleasant and beloved songs of the Christmas season. Although its popularity was revived in recent years by artist Michael Bublé, the holiday classic was born back in 1924 when it was composed by J. Kimball Gannon, a graduate of St. Lawrence University in New York. However, Bing Crosby is responsible for stirring Americans to fall in love with this enchanting oldie.
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During the 1940s, an unsettled and discouraged America heard his captivating voice sing the words:
“Christmas eve will find me/Where the love light gleams/I’ll be home for Christmas/ If only in my dreams.”
Amid the ‘nightmare of war’
Americans resonated with these words because they were dreaming, not of a white Christmas, but of the day when their husbands and sons would come home from war in Europe and Japan. Our soldiers overseas wanted nothing more than to go home, and lonely mothers and wives hoped for this as well. Nevertheless, as the nightmare of war raged on, the Christmas miracle of going home for the holidays was an unfulfilled dream.
Home is a Christmas symbol — being with family, exchanging gifts and eating ‘round the table. As another classic says, “There’s no place like home for the holidays.”
However, many people cannot go home for Christmas, and maybe you can relate.
Perhaps you are too far away to go home for Christmas. Maybe you have been ostracized from your home for believing in Christ, or for some other reason. It may be that your home is lonelier this year because you have lost family and friends in death. Maybe you have no home at all, like Naomi and Ruth of the Old Testament (Ruth 1:1-22).
Good news of Christmas
The good news of Christmas is that you can have a home — a home in heaven — because Christ the Lord left His home in heaven. The Son of God came to earth, lived a righteous life and endured God’s holy wrath to secure a place for you on Canaan’s happy shore. When you trust wholly in His finished work for your eternal salvation, He promises that you will have, “a house not made with hands, (but one) eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. 5:1b).
And one day, your dream of going home to heaven will become a reality.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This article was written by Brandon Bramlett, pastor of Bandana Baptist Church in west Kentucky, and originally published by Kentucky Today, news service of the Kentucky Baptist Convention.
